Lovelace Medal for Dr Sue Sentance

Many congratulations to our colleague Dr Sue Sentance, Director of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre here. She has just been awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal 2024.

This prestigious award is presented annually by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. It is given to recipients for their outstanding contributions to the advancement of computing. 

Previous winners include worldwide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the information retrieval pioneer Karen Spärck Jones (a former Professor Emerita of Computers and Information here) and recent Nobel Prize winner Sir Demis Hassabis (an alumnus of this Department).

Also receiving the BCS Lovelace Medal this year are Professor Aggelos Kiayias who is Chair in Cyber Security and Privacy, and Director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, and Professor Philippa Gardner FREng, a former EPSRC Advanced Fellow here who is now Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at Imperial College London. They are both winners of the Lovelace Research Medal while Sue Sentance receives the Lovelace Education Medal.

Julia Adamson MBE, BCS Managing Director for Education and Public Benefit , said: "All three recipients of this year’s BCS Lovelace Medal are truly deserving, having significantly advanced the global reputation of computing as a force for good. Their work spans crucial areas such as computing education, cybersecurity, and software languages, each contributing meaningfully to society through information technology.

"We are proud to honour their achievements at a time when computing is more vital than ever to our daily lives. Their profound impact on the IT industry and their diverse accomplishments make them worthy of this prestigious award."

Sue Sentence is an experienced educator, researcher and leader in computing education. She is awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal in recognition for her exceptional contributions and research in computing education. In particular, her PRIMM approach to teaching programming ('Predict, Run, Investigate, Modify and Make'), which has been adopted by teachers globally.

Sue also played a leading role in establishing the National Centre for Computing Education and is an active member of the Computing at School board and the BCS School Curriculum and Assessment Committee.  

Congratulations, Sue!